Good Fight Ministries
Discerning the signs of the times...
IS THE GOLDEN COMPASS MISDIRECTED? —3
PULLMAN'S COSMIC REVISIONISM
Pullman's blockbuster children's trilogy resurrects elements of the long-debunked Gnostic heresy that turned everything upside down by calling good evil and evil good and by making villains into heroes and heroes into villains. In Pullman's trilogy, God becomes evil and Satan becomes good. The hiss of the serpent morphs into the chorus of songbirds announcing a new day. Original sin becomes human liberation and the fall of humanity is recast as the way in, not out, of paradise. Rebellious and evil angels are transformed into freedom fighters that are here to save the day and demons are even transformed into angelic furry animals and friendly spirit guides. Those who love God are recast and repudiated with the most intolerant and vicious hatred while witches become the hope of the new world. It is in this "devilishly inventive" way that Pullman (who admittedly seeks “to undermine the basis of Christian belief”) subversively turns the affections and affinities of the young and unscrupulous from God to Satan, witches and demons.
One of Pullman's adaptations of Milton's, Paradise Lost, which allows Pullman to set the stage, is Satan's temptation of the angels that he drew to destruction. Milton portrays Satan pulling off this deception against a third of the angelic host by deceiving them into believing that God is not truly their creator and persuades them to believe that they may have simply come about through natural processes on their own (sound familiar?). Thus Satan is able to persuade the angels to rebel against God by denying his sovereign right over their lives and that they were created by divine order. Pullman has one of his angels, representing Satan, describe God as a fraud who merely condensed from dust in the following manner:
“The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty - those were all names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves - the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of dust as we are, and dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.”
While Pullman's revision of Genesis and the fall rehashes the satanic deception more elaborately than Milton in his poetry, there is an appalling difference. While Milton presents the satanic lie as a deception that denies angels a heavenly future, Pullman serves up this preposterous scenario to our children as though it were gospel truth. Ironically, the foundational teaching, “to undermine the basis of Christian belief,” in Pullman's series is a lie from Satan in Paradise Lost. Pullman who declares that he is aware of the power of stories to "teach" is, in effect, teaching our children the most diabolical rebellion against their creator, their parents and the Christian faith. Pullman's trilogy depicts the rebellious angels who defy God as heroic. They are led by the Satan figure, “Lord Asriel,” and seek the death of God as they enlist the other characters in the series to join their rebellious war on God. The series goes on to chronicle Lord Asriel's quest to overthrow the “Authority” and set up his own kingdom known as the republic:
“I think he's a-waging a higher war than that. I think he's aiming a rebellion against the highest power of all. He's gone a-searching for the dwelling place of the Authority Himself, and he's a-going to destroy him…He's going to find the Authority and kill Him…he's Lord Asriel, he's not like other men.” –Philip Pullman. The Subtle Knife, pp 40-42
While God is ridiculously portrayed as a dying wimp, Pullman of course has his Satan figure, called Lord! As the story continues to progresses as witches, who are depicted to be good even though they align themselves against God, are able to communicate with Satan's fallen angels via computer. They declare that they are seeking revenge on God and they in turn join forces with the fallen angels. In time, creatures from parallel universes join in the rebellion against God seeking liberation from His moral law, which of course, is twisted and made to be immoral. This is where Lyra and Will come in; the two main characters of the trilogy. Lyra and Will are the new Adam and Eve and Lyra is said to be a reincarnation of the original Eve who partook of the forbidden fruit in obedience to the devil. Lyra and Will are the keys to successful rebellion against the “Authority,” or "God." If they can be seduced, Satan can win the day against the “Authority.” Another satanic figure named Mary is taught by the “shadows” that she is to “play the serpent” in seeking to seduce Will and Lyra. The fall from the “Authority” is depicted, as in other satanic literature, as a fall upward, being liberated from the repressive regime of the “Authority.”
Pullman, as the Gnostics of old, totally inverts the fall and claims that rather than “lead[ing] to sin, death, misery, hell…” the “temptation is wholly beneficent….[and is] a fall into grace, towards wisdom” (www.thirdway.org.uk). God's Word warns that we are not to be deceived by Satan who continues to appear as an angel of light in order to deceive us in the same way he deceived Eve of old:
"But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ…And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve" –2 Cor 11:3; 14-15
It is amazing how well Phillip Pullman fits the bible prophecy quoted above as he seeks to initiate millions of children into the modern gnosis. Notice the positive spin that Pullman tries to give Satan on his publisher's website as he depicts Satan as an angel of enlightenment rather than the deceiver he really is:
“So, for instance, the book depicts the Temptation and Fall not as the source of all woe and misery, as in traditional Christian teaching, but as the beginning of true human freedom something to be celebrated, not lamented. And the Tempter is not an evil being like Satan, prompted by malice and envy, but a figure who might stand for Wisdom.” –www.randomhouse.com
Pullman is basically teaching children that rebellion against the authority of God is good and liberating. In a webchat he justified rebellion against God and supported Satan's reasoning with Eve by echoing Satan's promise of knowledge to Eve in the garden of Eden. He stated that, “only when we lose our innocence, can we take our first steps towards gaining wisdom.” Pullman further asserts, “This is the moment when the two children begin to leave their childhood behind and this, to my mind, is what the story of Adam and Eve is all about. It's the moment we left our childhood behind and began to grow up.” (www.bbc.co.uk). In his trilogy, growing up means rejecting the biblical God and giving ourselves over to the rebellion in a quest for esoteric or occult knowledge, while rejecting God's moral commands, His authority and ultimately seeking to kill God off. My friends, this is no subtle deception!
Pullman has said that he wanted to make Lyra and Will easy to relate to for obvious reasons. He admitted, “Lyra is a very ordinary child and so is Will, and there are hundreds of thousands of millions of kids like Will and Lyra all around the place. The great things they do are doable by all of us…” The truth of the matter is that the first humans did not "grow up" but lost paradise; lost the Spirit of God; became miserable; grew old; and died horrible deaths. The promise of a better life in the name of being liberated from the Lord God led to their separation from all that was good, beautiful and alive. Their sin did not lead them to a beautiful world but to a world filled with thorns, thistles and pain. The reality is that Pullman is not leading our children to a better world for they too must die, and if they are led into rebellion against God and die in that rebellion God will give them over to the world they want. They will receive a world without His loving presence. A world filled with eternal darkness and despair. A world filled with everything that God is not, including the wicked hatred and eternal despair that fills those who hate God. The bible calls this new world "HELL" .
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